And there they were by the Brighton wall, under the rust-green iron of the boardwalk, sprawled out in the million-year pebbles, shoes kicked off like wreckage, tangled together the way kids do when the night before still hums in their blood. The mural above them, some half-face phantom in faded paint, eyes wide with knowing, words bleeding below - Two Years of Decadence - like a prophecy, like a joke, like a sentence we’re all already serving.
And the girl - she wasn’t tangled, no - she leaned off to the side, back against the cold flint wall, listening to her secret music, head tilted to the wide sea nobody could see from here, the sea that keeps time with all the broken beats of the city. She was cool, black coat wrapped around her, headscarf tight, like she’d been here forever, like she knew all the stories the gulls scream and the iron forgets.
It was all there: the damp stink of stone, the sound of a vans clattering above, the faint taste of salt and fried oil drifting from the pier, and the silence between kids who don’t need words, just bodies and the breathing hush of the sea nearby. Decadence? Hell, decadence is just the name the world gives you when you’re young and don’t care and you love too hard to bother about tomorrow.
And the mural - who painted it, who left it to fade? Maybe some kid from a different decade, maybe a dreamer who saw the same wreckage and thought: this is worth marking, this deserves a shrine. Two years, two minutes, two beats of the heart. All the same. The waves will come in and erase it anyway, like everything else.
(Written by ChatGPT in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac.)
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